Doorway page
A doorway page is one of many near-identical pages made to rank for similar searches and funnel visitors somewhere else. Google treats it as spam.
A doorway page is a page made to rank for one search out of a set of very similar ones, and then pass the visitor on somewhere else. They usually come in bulk: dozens or hundreds of pages that differ by a city name or a product variation and offer little of their own.
Google lists doorway abuse in its spam policies, so a site built on them risks being pushed down or dropped from results.
What doorway pages look like
The classic case is a business that serves one area but creates a page for every town nearby, each with the same text and a new place name swapped in. Another is a set of pages for the cheap, best and affordable versions of the same search, all pointing to one product page.
For example, a coffee roaster makes 120 pages, one per town, each titled with the words "Coffee delivery in" and the town. Each has two identical paragraphs and a button to the shop. Nothing on them is about the town. Those are doorways.
Location pages aren't doorways when each one has something real to say: the address, opening hours, staff or stock for that place.
Doorway page vs bridge page
The two are close. A bridge page is a thin page whose only job is to send people to another site, often an affiliate link. A doorway page is about scale: many pages aimed at near-identical searches. A set of bridge pages, one per search, is a set of doorways too.
Doorways and AI answers
Mass-produced pages are a poor bet for AI search too. When a platform reads pages to answer a question, it looks for something it can use, like a fact, a comparison or a clear explanation. A page that says the same thing as 119 others with a town name changed gives it nothing new, and it's likely to quote a page with substance instead.